Status Updates From In the Meantime: Temporalit...

A balanced space-time approach is culturally necessary for democracy in order keep state power and the market in check.

I found that what most populations encounter is not the fast pace of life but the structural demand that they must recalibrate in order to fit into the temporal expectations demanded by various institutions, social relationships, and labor arrangements.

Time is lived at the intersection of a range of social differences that includes class, gender, race, immigrations status, and labor. A temporal perspective offers insight into inequality and recognizes the transecting multidimensionality of social differences. Once acknowledged, the temporal is discernible everywhere.

The concern over speedup is less about time than it is about space. The speedup narrative is based in a critique of a newly unruly tempo that threatens the spatial virtues of democracy.1 Such a perspective seems determined to envision time and space as competing cultural values rather than intertwined facts of life.

In the spatializing of slowness through buildings and theme parks, slow spaces sustain uneven temporalities.

Instead of creating a new libera- tory relationship to time, slow practices reassert the power of institutional space in people’s lives. These spatial solutions to the problem of speed work upon people’s sense of time in order to keep them fixed within a confining relationship to capital.

Slowness does not and cannot acknowledge its material preconditions or the diversity of demands that sit outside its concrete edifices and sacred spaces. Many of these material re- lations are fast paced, mindless, and mundane; slowness hides the rhythm of material relations, the very condition of its possibility.

Temporal differences are said to exist because people treat time differently. For example, the multiplicity of time refers to the different ways one can choose to spend one’s time on a daily basis. It is the ability to manage one’s time that “creates a temporality conducive to ethical relations with others.

To live slowly in this sense, then, means engaging in mindful rather than mindless practices which make us consider the pleasure or at least the purpose of each task to which we give our time.

But what makes the staycation unique and worthy of consideration is that capitalists and other disciplinary institutions of power, in this case big media, construct new and innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movements in space.

Following the directive to staycate is not necessarily a new form of false consciousness; it is an intensified technological and economic mode of subjecthood that depends on already established cultural anxieties about time and mobility.

The still citizen is a threatening figure for capital. In Polar Inertia Paul Virilio argues that at the heart of capitalism is a state of permanent mobility. The staycation fits completely within his frame, as it provides a context of mobile immobility. The flow needs to keep flowing; when people are stationary, still, and calm, the market suffers.

Proponents of the slow life need to examine their discursive terrain and the structural inequalities that might lead to speed as a condition of living; moreover, they should examine the ways in which their own lifestyle choices may simply displace speed onto the temporalities of less privileged populations.

Living slowly will not become a form of radical activism until it acknowledges the truly temporal.

The slow food movement is concerned with the global locals (or authentic Others) rather than the global relations of dependence. Slow food eateries are celebrated rather than the service staff. In all of this, the time of nature is valued at the expense of those that deliver experiences of nature.

The slow food critique of speed depends on a spatial understanding of time. Such a conception of time is detrimental to those individuals and social groups who are busy producing a slow culture, yet remain completely outside it. Energy is directed toward creating new spaces for slow living and lionizing iconic locals, not recognizing laborers.

As Virilio argues, when space yields to time, democracy fails.